British Figurative Art

Around 1995, an editorial in Art Monthly criticized the British Council for promoting figurative art as the main achievement of British art in the 20th century. In 1993, one of the first Francis Bacon exhibitions since the artist's death took place at the Museo Correr in Venice, with Richard Hamilton in the British Pavilion. In the following Biennale, in 1995, Leon Kossoff was in the British Pavilion, and he also featured prominently in the curated exhibition Identita e Alterita, which focused on images of the human body. Other British Council touring shows focusing on post-war figurative painting were also cited as evidence of this disproportionate emphasis.

The Bacon exhibition at the Museo Correr, and the Kossoff exhibition in the British Pavilion in 1995, were both curated by David Sylvester. As a result, he was strongly connected to the promotion of a group of artists widely referred to, however erroneously, as the 'School of London'. To an extent this showed Sylvester continuing to favour one (although not the only) sort of art he had admired since the 1950s: figurative painting, predominantly of the human body, combining close observation and a relish for paint as substance. However, within amongst British artists falling into this category, Sylvester's own preferences had changed over the years.

Princess Diana and Andrea Rose at the 1995 Kossoff exhibition in Venice (photo by William Feaver)

Sylvester had been amongst the very first to write in support of both Frank Auerbach and Lucian Freud, but had long since ceased to write about either artist (criticizing the later work of both artists in a public discussion in Edinburgh in 1995). On the other hand, Kossoff and Euan Uglow, neither of whom he had written about before (except for passing mentions), were both the subject of eulogistic texts in the nineties. Some of the same qualities can also be found in younger painters he admired in the nineties, Jenny Saville and Cecily Brown, while it is also relevant in this context that Sylvester was a huge admirer of Gilbert & George, to the despair of some of his admirers. (The recent Robert Hughes volume The Spectacle of Skill contains, amongst its previously unpublished material, a passage in which Hughes states his admiration for Sylvester's work while completely failing to comprehend why he was so drawn to Gilbert & George.)

In his essay for the 1995 Kossoff catalogue, Sylvester makes (perhaps too) clear that he considered Kossoff to be directly descended from Constable, as he did another English artist who he sometimes claimed to be the greatest of his generation, Malcolm Morley. The excellent series of responses to the proposition 'There's No Such Thing as British Art' in volume one of the Paul Mellon Centre's British Art Studies reminded me of Sylvester, not least because Martin Hammer, in his statement, quotes him on Sickert: "The tragic flaw in English painting is compromise, unwillingness to be committed to a point of view, a desire to have the best of two or more worlds (especially, in our time, a present and a past world)." Sylvester's sense of British art, or at least the best British art, seems to have involved the attributes found in the artists mentioned above, and I think this is why he was so keen on making this connection between Constable and Kossoff.

This is all pretty well known and I'm always keen to draw attention to the less familiar aspects of Sylvester's work, but it's striking how neatly the group of essays about British artists he chose to reprint in his selected essays, About Modern Art, fit together. In the final edition 22 out of 77 essays are about British artists, of which only five are about abstract art, and only one on a British abstract painter (Bridget Riley). Given how wonderfully Sylvester wrote about artists such as (abstract) Pasmore, it's hard not to see this presentation as a streamlining of the British tradition. One of my favourite unpublished Sylvester statements, in fact, is a wonderful defence of Marcus Harvey's Myra at the time of the Sensation exhibition, which demonstrates his conviction in its power and importance not only as an image but as a painting.

What I mean to say, simply, is that in reflecting on Sylvester and British figurative art in the 1990s, it's important to remember there was a lot more going on than the succession of Bacon exhibitions he curated. He paid close attention to the work of younger artists, sometimes in texts which haven't been reprinted and sometimes in personal correspondence and other unpublished writings, but it all adds up to a strong sense of an ongoing tradition.

Art Criticism of an Aftermath

From very early on in his career Sylvester believed that the art of his time was, to quote the title of a 1957 essay, 'the Art of an Aftermath'. The most incisive writing of his early years as a critic, on artists such as Klee, Bacon and Giacometti, was animated by a conviction that they were practicing art criticism within their art. To see Sylvester's criticism as 'existentialist' is probably at least as wrong as seeing the art of Bacon and Giacometti in those terms. If anything, Sylvester underplayed the post-war context which now seems inseparable from much of Bacon and Giacometti's best-known work. Herbert Read took issue with Sylvester's first radio broadcast on Bacon because 'the language is such as might be used by a lecturer in a physics laboratory'. Sylvester's 'analytical method', for Read, brings to mind Wordsworth's phrase 'we murder to dissect'.

It is revealing that near the start of Looking at Giacometti, Sylvester lists the similarities between Giacometti and another of his heroes, Wittgenstein:

There is a similar consuming dedication to an activity, and a similar refusal to take for granted accepted assumptions about the purpose and possibilities of that activity. There is a similar feeling that this activity is not a means of producing works of philosophy or works of art, but a search that can never lead to a final solution. There is a similar passion for economy [..] a similar reluctance to make their work public [...]

(it goes on)

Undoubtedly Sylvester is in one sense a man of feeling in the lineage of Pater and Berenson. He referred to 'the way I can't help writing about art, which is not unlike St Teresa of Avila's reports on her intercourse with the deity', and certainly, reading Sylvester is often like reading a review of a live event. Tom Lubbock astutely described this sort of criticism as one where 'the critic performs, not by talking to us about work to which we're both assumed to have access, but rather by experiencing the work on our behalf, for our benefit'.

An interesting thing about Sylvester's writing, however, is that this 'phenomenological' approach coexists with the side which saw the condition of modern art as a form of criticism. Sylvester found he couldn't write about the Minimalist works he loved, because the experience alone was insufficient. The quality shared by Sylvester's writing not just about Giacometti and Bacon but also Moore and Magritte, was that he was able to by turns convey a visceral experience of their work, and see it as the outcome of a comprehensible process. This says something about both the jaded post-war art world in which Sylvester developed as a critic, and his pragmatic sense of criticism as a vocation.   

Matching Up

'The figurative artist [my italics] is now competing with all the art of the past. In the Renaissance he was only competing with the Romans and copies of the Greek.
Giacometti was competing with the Egyptian, the Sumerian, the Cycladic, the Byzantine, the Romanesque.
And there was also Cézanne to deal with [...]'

This comes from a notebook compiled by David Sylvester around 1992, possibly after having seen the major Giacometti exhibition at the Musée d'art moderne de la Ville de Paris (November 30, 1991-March 15, 1992). Compare this with an earlier (c.1960) comment that Abstract Expressionism, like Surrealism, was an attempt to 'see what could be salvaged from the wreck' of Duchamp and Dada. Neither note made it into the book they both relate to, Sylvester's Looking at Giacometti 1994, but they both reinforce the point that Sylvester was above all an advocate of figurative art. This allegiance is easily exaggerated or misinterpreted, because Sylvester's interests were much wider than this, and in 1960 he was at his most energetic in promoting Abstract Expressionism.
But reading the comments above I was reminded of Francis Bacon's well-known outburst against abstract art in his second (1966) interview with Sylvester. Sylvester would lament Bacon's closed-mindedness to abstract art and the arguments they had as a result, but what Sylvester and Bacon shared was a strong sense of tradition and dialogue with the art of the past. However you feel about the Francis Bacon and the Masters exhibition at the Sainsbury Centre, it does approach this question of the grand tradition head-on. And Sylvester, like Bacon, was a quintessentially European in his regard for the integrity of a figurative tradition, as shown by his choice of artists- Moore, Giacometti, Bacon, de Kooning. And much of his advocacy of Bacon and Giacometti has to do with the fish-out-of -water character of their art. Bacon and Giacometti were for Sylvester the closest he got to finding his own Picasso and Braque. But where Picasso and Braque in their Cubist years were like mountaineers roped together, Sylvester saw Giacometti as more like a high-jumper. The mountaineer knows when he's reached the summit, but however much the high-jumper achieves, he fails in the end.

A Certain Doubt

I've always loved the end of Sylvester's autobiographical essay 'Curriculum Vitae' (in About Modern Art, first published 1996), which confronts Sylvester's disappointment at seeing a Giacometti retrospective in 1978, when it occurred to him that:

'Seeking had become- what it never had with Cézanne, say, or with Mondrian- fetishistic.
One day (according to Maurice Jardot) Picasso told Michel Leiris that he felt that the work of their old friend Giacometti was becoming increasingly monotonous and repetitive. Trying to explain and excuse this, Leiris spoke of Giacometti's consuming and intense desire "to find a new solution to the problem of figuration". Picasso answered: "In the first place there isn't any solution, there never is a solution, and that's as it should be.'

This comes, of course, from someone who did perhaps more than anyone else to establish Giacometti's reputation in Britain and whose monograph on the artist (Looking at Giacometti, 1994) was thirty-five years in the making. It's nothing like a loss of faith but an acceptance that opinions change over time.

I quote this because it complements something John Ashbery wrote in 1971 which I recently read, reprinted in Jed Perl's anthology Art in America, 1945-1970. Ashbery notes similarities between Giacometti and Leland Bell, with the caveat that:

'where the latter artist [Giacometti] seems sometimes to have embarked on a hopeless mission, a sort of Penelope's web created only to be rubbed out and rebegun, Bell is not afraid to contemplate completeness [...]'

Ashbery, like Sylvester, knew something about doubt and uncertainty, and like Sylvester, realized that for that uncertainty to become permanent is a parody of itself, a strange kind of certainty.

Of course, there are many similarities between Giacometti and another of Sylvester's passions, Francis Bacon, not the least of which is the knowledge one has in looking at their works that they could so easily have been destroyed, or are perhaps inferior to works which didn't survive. I often think of their surviving works like the fortunate survivors from ancient civilizations, which managed to escape all the opportunities for their destruction (this of course applies in different degrees to all art), with this exchange from Giacometti's interview with Sylvester (in Looking at Giacometti) an indication as to why:

DS: So when we see, say, a standing woman, this sculpture cast in bronze has possibly been made in a couple of hours but had already been done perhaps fifty or a hundred times.
AG: Yes, certainly.
DS: Do you know whether you need this constant repetition for personal reasons or for artistic reasons? And when you've redone something fifty times, is it decidedly better the fiftieth time than it was the twentieth?
AG: Absolutely not. Maybe no better than the first time.

There's always the risk of romanticising the destructive element in Giacometti and Bacon, and no doubt many other artists have gone through the same process without it becoming part of their mystique in this way. But to go back to Giacometti's doubt, one of his differences from Bacon is that I can't imagine Bacon saying this (again from the Looking at Giacometti interview):

'It's a matter of complete indifference to me whether a work is a success or not [...] A failure interests me just as much as a success. And we ought to exhibit our less good works rather than choose the best [...] because if there are others hidden away that aren't so good and don't hold up, even if you don't show them they still exist. And if someone looks very carefully he can see weaknesses even in the best of them. So we should start with the poorest.'

Bacon, the gambler, took risks in his work because he was constantly hoping for the marvellous accident that would produce a masterpiece and define his career, make his time on earth mean something. He took an impersonal view of luck and was happy to accept it. Giacometti, in this statement at any rate, saw every piece as one more plus or minus in the overall tally. The question with Giacometti, which the Picasso anecdote above sums up wonderfully, is this: if Bacon was concerned with 'deepening the game' he thought art had become, was Giacometti refusing to play it? Marla Daniels has that great line from The Wire: "you cannot lose if you do not play".

Ten Modern Artists

 

I've been reading the scripts for Sylvester's television series Ten Modern Artists (1964) and declare myself pleasantly surprised. Even for someone as invested in Sylvester's work as me, I saw the list and thought I knew pretty much what to expect. The artists are, of course, familiar enough: MATISSE-PICASSO- MONDRIAN- BRANCUSI- KLEE- BONNARD-SOUTINE- GIACOMETTI- POLLOCK- DE KOONING. And given the educational format of the programmes, and the tedium induced by many more recent television documentaries about the modern masters, I did wonder whether this series would end up as much more than Sylvester on autopilot.

 

In fact, the series is extremely clever. In the episode on Bonnard, Sylvester remarks that 'nothing about his work is what it seems to be', and that Bonnard's subject matter is a disguise, a veil drawn over what his paintings are about. I felt like the same thing was going on with these programmes. In part they are inevitably biographical lectures, but Sylvester's skill lies in using the format (and I can imagine him having to tread carefully to get the series commissioned) to make broader points about 20th century sculpture. The programme on Brancusi is a case in point. The Romanian, for Sylvester, 'streamlined sculpture', revolutionising the art form by choosing not to compromise himself by taking a job as an assistant to Rodin. Putting form before movement, taking a DIY attitude to sculpture, belief in truth to materials, these things all mark Brancusi out as a key figure.

But then the programme changes tack, and turns into a programme about Henry Moore. That wasn't in the title. And not only that, but Sylvester seems pretty sure that Moore is, if not as revolutionary as Brancusi, ultimately more interesting:

'Moore’s art is not only more complex than Brancusi’s: it is more dramatic and more robust, less refined and less perfect. It probably lacks the absolute authority of Brancusi’s greatest images, but I feel it has a greater richness of meaning. Because Moore is a less pure but more fertile kind of artist than Brancusi, it’s not surprising that his work is much more various in style'.

Reading the script, I realized something that hadn't come across in any of Sylvester's written work: that Brancusi's perfectionism and independence might have been limitations. Perhaps there is no greater endorsement of Moore's work in Sylvester's mature work than the implication here that the British sculptor was able to combine Brancusi's innovations with a professionalism and willingness to adapt (often underrated in artists), and thereby create a more wide-ranging art. Let's not forget, a previous programme was about Picasso, in whom Sylvester admired the inexhaustible range which made him the 'quintessential' modern artist. Picasso stated in About Modern Art (1st ed. 1996) that the big question of modern art was that of Matisse versus Picasso, and after initially favouring Matisse Sylvester came down on Picasso's side. In the Brancusi programme I can sense some of the same issues, such as the impact and perfection of an artist's very finest works (Brancusi and Matisse would be favoured in this sense) judged against the range and depth of the body of work. In this series Sylvester seems to suggest that for the twentieth century the latter criteria are more telling. He was to find Picasso's inexhaustible variations on a theme and Moore's vast output of public sculpture more relevant in the end than the interminable quest for perfection, I think.
This is no doubt a gross simplification of all four of those artists and Sylvester never makes this explicit, but what is certain is that he plays off Brancusi against Moore, and Matisse against Picasso, and in this series I always feel that the individual artists are being discussed in a way that stands for characteristics which could be applied in larger contexts.
 

I won't go through all of the programmes here, but to give further examples, the Bonnard programme is a wonderful demonstration of how the Frenchman was absolutely contemporary in his understanding of the subject-content division, which Sylvester spent so many column inches on in the 1950s, in the face of those who were adamant a painting was about the subject depicted.

My other favourite is the final programme on De Kooning, which most clearly addresses Sylvester's continued belief in the power of figuration. Much of the programme is taken up with De Kooning's  

Woman paintings, which are compared with nudes by Bacon, de Stael and Giacometti to assert the continuing relevance of the theme. Sylvester had, of course featured abstract artists in Mondrian, Klee and Pollock, but in concluding his series with De Kooning, Sylvester concludes with his final vindication of figuration. Indeed, his portrayal of De Kooning as the maverick Abstract-Expressionist reminds me of the prodigal son, or the former Communists such as Stephen Spender and Arthur Koestler who renounced the Party in The God That Failed (1949). Anyone wondering why there was no programme on Bacon will see that, by putting Bacon's Crouching Nude (1960) in this final programme, he is bringing the Irish painter into the same category of faith in the figure in an age of abstraction. And Sylvester certainly thought Pollock a greater artist than Bacon, but he is unequivocal about his own position on the figuration-abstraction debate, as he returns once more to Bonnard:

'I would say that figuration in art is likely to go further than abstraction. This is not because there’s any special virtue in figuration for its own sake. It’s because figuration offers a resistance. It creates a tension. It makes the work exist on two contradictory levels at once, as in this drawing by Bonnard where the marks have their own life as a dance on paper but also a precise statement of another kind of life'.